Mysticism, Thick and Thin

Summary

WE are all mystics nowadays but we need not be contentiously so. As we have been told recently by a Professor of Education (and he surely ought to know): ‘The hot breath of the charismatic behind one's back is disconcerting.' Yet we of the milder sort may still keep in heart. For it would be strange, would it not, if the alleged greatest of all experiences should be confined to a few, a very, very few? I know that, on a similar plane, there are very few great painters, great poets, great philosophers, great technologists, great chemists, great mathematicians: we ordinary folk lack the power of great creation. But we have at least the power of appreciation; and I imagine that appreciation is of the same kind, although not perhaps of the same order, as creation. We do have in us something, however scanty, of the creative artist or thinker: we are not cut off from them completely. As Mr E. M. Forster remarks somewhere: ‘We are rapt into a region near to that where the artist worked.’ So my query with regard to the mystic vision remains. Is it conceivable that just this, allegedly the greatest prize of all, is denied to the vast majority of mankind?

The first of the suggestions I am going to make is that it is not so denied. We all in our own way, and in our own degree, sense the divine. I know I am using doubtful words and I shall seek a later occasion to clear them up somewhat. But if we take as a preliminary pointer a remark from an early essay of the late Clement Webb: ‘A theory of the world may fairly be called Mysticism in which the ultimate truth and reality of things is held to be a unity the consciousness of which is attainable as a feeling inexpressible by thought', are we indeed all strange to such a feeling? Have we not all of us, at different times and in various situations, had this conviction of unity thrust, as it were, upon our consciousness without our being able to give a reasoned account of it? Even in the sphere of everyday action, do we not sometimes ponder and ponder some perplexity' and of a sudden, somehow, our path becomes clear.